This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

A woman approaches you. She's wearing a dark coat. She reaches into an inside pocket and holds something out. "Hey you," she says, "look at this." You're not entirely sure what you're looking at; but it's beautiful. Multi-faceted like a diamond. Intricate like one of those sculptures where the artist makes stone look like lace. You try to get a closer look, but she whisks it away and holds out her other hand. This one holds something as alien as the first thing, just as beautiful, just as intricate, but wholly different. Even as she tells you to look at it she's pulling it away, but there's something new back in her first hand....

This is what reading This Is How You Lose The Time War feels like. An onslaught of sharp and beautiful things, one after the other, no context and no mercy. Neither of the heroes, if heroes is even what you could call them, strike me as the kind of women prone to hand-holding, so I guess this makes sense. 'Keep up or drown and I really don't care which,' is a sentiment I could see coming from either one of them. It's certainly how they feel about each other. At first anyway.

Every second line of this novella is the kind of startling perfection most other books would hinge their entire selves around. The worldbuilding, or at least the worldbuilding shown to the reader is flashes and reflections, is rich and raises endless questions. It's not hard to picture a multi-volume sci-fi epic set in this world(s), but at the same time I didn't find myself unsatisfied with the briefness of this story. And the inherent briefness of a novella is nine times out of ten my main issue with the format, so that's high praise from me. It was similar to Kai Ashante Wilson's two breathtaking books that way; the prose is rich enough and just challenging enough that each lines carries the weight of two, or three.

If you were to strip this prose back to the barest language I suppose you would find a plot that lands on the scant side. Easy to spoil, with beats that aren't impossible to predict. You might notice that a good third of this novella is just two (human? delightfully unclear) woman confessing their feelings for each other in different ways while nothing else really happens. Although I think even in this scenario you'd have be impressed by how time travel is handled here, how all the usual paradox's aren't ignored so much as not even dignified with a response.

But anyway, these complaints that might ruin another book mean little here, because you're not stripping the prose away. It'll be there to paint scenes so soft you could almost sink into them, to carve moments so sharp you might look up from your reading to check you're not actually losing blood. When you finish a book like this you know you've read something special. Even if you didn't love it, even if you flat-out hated it, it's something wholly unlike anything else. And wholly different things are rare gifts in this world.

(My thanks to netgalley for supplying me with a review copy of this book).